Tableau of The Bifurcates & Memory Sculpture by Lyndon Preston.

This column marks its fifth anniversary this month.  It seems hard to believe, but I started writing for Chronogram in October of 1999, the first month that the magazine expanded to its current large format.  In the past five years, both the magazine and the Mid-Hudson art scene I cover have expanded to fit this format in ways that few of us could have imagined.

Something very special has taken place in our region over the past few years, at least in terms of the field of the visual arts, my stock-in-trade.  Recently I've had a few occasions to reflect on where things stand now, and how much they've changed.  While there have been lots of artists living and working here for quite a long time - witness the influx started by Thomas Cole's Hudson River School in the 19th century, and the renewed wave begun by the Woodstock art colonies in the early 20th - it feels as though we're coming up on another, bigger critical mass of activity now.

The source of this new energy should be no secret: as I've covered it in this column, the infrastructure of decentralized arts organizations and commercial and "alternative" exhibition venues has grown exponentially of late, bringing together the growing number of interesting, talented artists, and incidentally building a significant base of art lovers and collectors to materially support the work.  (Don't get me wrong, it's still an uphill battle to make a decent living as an artist, but the encouragement of an appreciative audience helps immeasurably in the quest.)

From some of the older, more established nonprofit institutions, like Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, to the more recent creation of curatorially adventurous venues, such as Art Omi International Sculpture Park in Ghent, there is an incredible range of opportunities for visual artists in our region.  I've witnessed the growth of the Art Society of Kingston's "First Saturday" openings from a handful of galleries visited by a group of 20 or 30 artists to an enormous string of commercial, cooperative, and various ephemeral ad hoc spaces that can hardly all be seen in one night, with throngs of people crowding Front and Wall Street at the height of the action.  And that's just Kingston - don't forget about "Second Saturdays" in Beacon, the third Saturday "art hop" in Poughkeepsie, Hudson's ArtWalks, and so on.

A frequently recurring motif in my column has been the importance of the locally based artists and art organizations.  From the specialized point of view that generally rules the ethereal realm of the elite international art trade, my emphasis on the local can seem downright dowdy and old-fashioned.  The very words "local" and "regional" are made to sound like cop-outs for artists and work that simply couldn't cut it on the competitive international scene.

Yes, there is quite a range of work done here, from the excellent to the...not so excellent.  In the space so generously granted me here, I've tried to focus on work that I have found compelling or powerful or centered or just plain interesting - and good.  When I've griped, mostly it's been about the screwed up priorities and politics of the artworld, especially when the ham-handed, top-down directives of the New York-based scene have negatively impacted local communities, as I wrote last year about Dia:Beacon, or pointedly overlooked and dismissed the vibrant regional scene, as in the ill-conceived Watershed project's placement of putatively public "cutting edge" art throughout the valley in a bid to foster the region's cultural profile.  (I thought that was what I was doing all along!)

I guess the aspect that has eluded direct expression so far is the importance of having artists who live and work here, people who fundamentally identify this place in one way or another as "home."  The texture of community, of lived experience, is something that can't be researched, or picked up in a weekend stay.  The insightful people who ground themselves here are as varied in their approaches to art as can be imagined.  While some find inspiration in the region's well-established landscape tradition, others depend on something about the relatively rural character of the area, the stillness and the open space, to be able to draw inside and really listen to themselves.

One such artist, whose work is on exhibit at Collaborative Concepts in Beacon this month, is Lyndon Preston.  She's been living and working in Pine Plains, in northern Dutchess County, for five years now, developing a clear, unique sculptural "voice" that is part existential and part purely emotional.  The series of works in this show are all based on abstract forms made from elaborately laminated and carved stacks of plywood and various steel or lead elements.  Exposing the horizontally striated cross-section of the wood as it is stacked to form a group of large, totem-like forms, these towering, abstract works possess a strong, linear quality.  The sculptural volumes of these works are described by a variety of organically swelling and subsiding contours, generally divided down a strong central furrow on their backs.  By contrast, the front sides of each of these five or six structures are identical, a simple, gently curving convex surface encased in dull grey patinaed lead.

The artist's intent with these challenging, abstract works is to find a visceral, physical analogue for the experience we all have of ourselves - how people attempt to create a certain almost impervious "front," the face we present to the world, while just underneath there is always much more to the story, in the varied traumas and other unique experiences each of us carries around in our emotional memories, the (in)side that we rarely expose to anyone.

Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that Preston came to her calling as a sculptor after first having dedicated herself to acting and the theater.  Reconstructing the inner world of a character is the essence of the actor's profession, an engagement that she has simply, and brilliantly, redirected here in purely physical, sculptural terms.

She finds strength in the remoteness of her Pine Plains studio, a welcome and not unhappy isolation to focus on the core content of her work that would simply be impossible in the 24/7 hubbub of life in the city.  Like the mythological giant Antaeus, who derived his strength from contact with the Earth (his mother), Preston draws an essential energy from remaining quite literally down-to-earth here, an energy that is then channeled into the powerful forms of her art.

There's already considerable buzz about this show, Preston's first, and that she is destined for much bigger things (like New York representation) in the near future.  I wouldn't doubt it for a minute.  But having gotten acquainted with her recently, I'm also pretty certain that she won't easily forget the place (and the people) that have nurtured her well-deserved success.